Florence, Italy, July 17, 2014 – Brazil captain Bruno Rezende said his team had worked extremely hard to improve their form after their 3-1 victory over Russia in their FIVB World League clash in Florence on Thursday.

He said: “I’m very proud of the way the team played today, especially after some of the poor performances we had in qualifying. We trained and practiced hard to get better after our struggles, because our philosophy is that practice makes a really big difference. We worked for this win over Russia.”

“Tomorrow we play Iran, and they proved what a very good team they are yesterday against Russia. They have a great defence but we will work hard again to beat them. Wallace spiked well today, but Brazil is a team of 16 people. We use all our squad and all play a part. We are well balanced.

Russia coach Andrey Voronkov said his side were tired. “We had a very long match with Iran the day before and we needed to win that in fewer sets than we did to be fresh for today. But it took a lot out of us. We understand what Brazil are capable of, and they did very well.”